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Twitter makes what seems like a good "gotcha" point here, but knowing a little bit about how social media bots work, I'd like to try and give my 2 cents about w
by logicalmonster 4y ago
Twitter makes what seems like a good "gotcha" point here, but knowing a little bit about how social media bots work, I'd like to try and give my 2 cents about why Musk's profile is probably not a great one for this type of analysis.
1) Many people who create a brand new Twitter account just end up following a few celebrities and then either not tweeting much or forgetting about the account after a short time after deciding that Twitter is not for them. It's likely that somebody well-known like Musk has a ton of actual human followers who would likely be labelled as bots because they're users with basically blank profiles that would be seen as bot-like.
2) When programming any reasonably sophisticated bot that doesn't just blurt out spam as fast as possible until its banned, the programmer would design it to blend in, to avoid detection by any defense mechanisms that Twitter would have. It would likely be seeded with an array of well-known Twitter profiles to follow at random to appear like a normal person with normal interests. Any particularly well-known Twitter account would be loaded with bots just through bot authors starting out by seeding it with a list of accounts they're familiar with.
3) Due to his life and wealth, Musk probably also exhibits characteristics that makes him seem more bot-like: such as probably tweeting in random bursts at odd hours in many different geographical locations.
4) Given his status as an international figure that also has a role in geopolitics and even military action, it's not impossible that there are state actors with big resources who create bots that follow Musks account for anything from trying to influence him with responses and through polls, or to try and make him look bad by "exposing" his bot activity at a later date when they need to influence public sentiment against him.
- simiones 4y agoAll good points, and all proving that the methods used by Musk are unreliable for saying who is or isn't a bot - thus proving Twitter's point.
- logicalmonster 4y agoIf I brought up good points, you should note that they apply more heavily to Musk than most other humans, which means that Twitter's response doesn't necessarily prove anything. It's not the testing tool that's necessarily bad. Botometer claims to look at over 1,000 features, which is pretty impressive. The problem might be applying that tool on Musk's profile for the specific reasons that I brought up. Musk is an outlier in many ways and isn't necessarily a good sample for an individual test as he'd tend to draw more bots than an average users' profile.
- evan_ 4y agoThe people who sign up for Twitter, dork around for a little while, and then leave and never return are not counted among the monetizable daily active users.
- logicalmonster 4y agoBotometer's test claims to use over 1000 individual features in its analysis and it is unknown (to me, please clarify if you know) if they use Twitter's exact definition of monetizable daily active users in their system.
- evan_ 4y agoWhat botometer does or does not do is completely irrelevant to twitter’s mDAU calculation. No matter how many thousands of individual features botometer has, it cannot (and will never be able to) tell whether Twitter has served ads to that user today.
- logicalmonster 4y ago> What botometer does or does not do is completely irrelevant to twitter’s mDAU calculation. Agreed, but this article was about the tool Musk used and that's what my comment was directed towards. > No matter how many thousands of individual features botometer has, it cannot (and will never be able to) tell whether Twitter has served ads to that user today. That seems likely, but I don't think that really means much given that Twitter's interest lays in serving as many ads as they can get away with.